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Higgs Boson: The Musical!

Sub-atomic music isn't some new indie rock craze. It's what happens when you assign pitches to data points. Third-party researchers have collaborated to set the Higgs boson experiments to music, and the result is a sweet little ditty reminiscent of a traditional Cuban dance.

Discovery Newsreports that computer scientists from Dante (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology of Europe), the ASTRA Project and INFN Cantania worked together to "sonify" CERN's experiments. By assigning notes to data intervals, the researchers were able to extract melodies from repeating patterns. You can listen to the short composition here.

The project demanded an enormous amount of processing power and utilized large research networks such as GÉANT, which crunches data at speeds up to 40Gbps.

While the project is a fun exercise in deducing patterns from complex data, it should be noted that there is no inherent musical style embedded in the Higgs boson. It depends entirely on the scales and sonic palette assigned to the data, and how that data is constructed and represented. Essentially, humans still make their own music — but, we think using sub-atomic particles as a blueprint is still pretty cool.

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